Start your weekend off right with an appreciation of The Art of Schrodinger’s Cat, whereby non-physicists, including artists, look at Schrodinger's Cat without the quantum mechanics. Jen-Luc Piquant's favorite (pictured at right): "Artist Jie Qi saw that the two states of the cat, alive and dead at the same time, were impossible. He illustrated that as an illusion, putting the cat inside an impossible box as well."

There's math in them there fireworks! "Enjoy the parabolic envelopes that form while those bright, sparkling, parabolic curves are etched into the sky tonight.”

Capturing Energy From A Flag Flapping In The Wind. French scientists have discovered how flags, made of the right piezoelectric material, can be an alternative to wind turbines. (It's actually best suited for charging batteries, due to the small amounts of energy produced.)

Five Properties of Physics that Affect Your Gas Mileage. "The term physics properties makes it sound inevitable, but 'driver behavior is a huge, huge factor in how good your gas mileage is,' [Argonne transportation engineer Steve] Ciatti said. 'Jackrabbit starts, driving at extremely high speeds on the highway—those are the best ways to burn a lot of gas.'”

Nanoscale physics explains why puddles stop spreading. “You start with something very simple, like the spread of a puddle, but you get at something very fundamental about intermolecular forces,” Ruben Juanes says.

The Basic Science Behind Creating Colors. "If you want to make someone see a particular color, science tells us there are three ways to do that. Two of them rely on quantum physics."

How to Solve a Physics Problem Undergrads Usually Get Wrong. Aha! We meet again, Car on a Frictionless Track. <twirls villain 'stache> Find the acceleration of "a cart on a frictionless track with a string that runs over a pulley to another mass hanging below."

Satire of the Week: Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Peter Higgs Regrets Fielding Your Physics-Based Dungeons and Dragons Questions. "If my half-elf wizard fell off a castle parapet high enough to kill him, could he cast the Dimension Door spell to teleport safely onto a lower surface before landing? My Dungeon Master said the impact would be fatal but I don’t think so."

Does Science Diminish Wonder or Augment It? "Two great poems with opposing views, composed over 200 years apart—“Lamia” by John Keats and “Water” by Philip Larkin—address these vexed questions through the entangled concepts of water and light"

Has physics cried wolf too often? "Mistakes are embarrassing, and getting over-excited about a statistical anomaly is silly. But these things happen, and the answer to building public confidence in science is not to pretend that they don’t."

Data Shows Surfer-Shaped Waves in Near-Earth Space. "Named Kelvin-Helmholtz waves in the late 1800s after their discoverers, these waves have since been discovered all over the universe: in clouds, in the atmospheres of other planets, and on the sun. Now two recently published papers highlight these shapely waves at the boundaries of near-Earth space."

Driving To Pluto: How Long Would It Take? "Just a mere 6,293 years (give or take a few decades). Oh, come on now. Stop complaining. That's not so bad. It's actually less time time than some creationists think the universe has existed. Of course, a 6,293-year-long road trip is not something you want to try with little kids. The asteroid belt is nothing but tourist traps and the rest stops really thin out after Saturn."

Galaxies Form Inside of Dark Matter 'Clumps,' New Study Shows. Related: Why does dark matter exist? Is it something surprising, or just to be expected? Also: If you've got a spar 55 minutes this weekend, check out this BBC documentary on dark matter, Dancing in the Dark:

What is dark energy? It’s everywhere. It will determine the fate of our universe. We still have no idea what it is.

Quantum physics provides startling insights into biological processes. Researchers in the European project PAPETS are getting a more fundamental understanding of how photosynthesis works and this could result in the design of much more efficient solar cells.

Your Own Body Smuggles In This Radioactive Particle. "Strontium-90 is, chemically speaking, a mimic of calcium. The cells in the body can’t tell the difference, so if people ingest any of the strontium-90 isotope, the body sees it as nutrition, and uses it the same way it would use calcium from a glass of milk." Related: This Is What Radiation Can Do To The Human Body [Warning: graphic image].

Computer Scientists Melted Werewolves to Show Off Their New Viscosity Formula: "we’re closer than ever to accurate jiggles and melts in our 3D objects."

This Is How Your Fruits and Vegetables Look in an MRI Machine. "Alexandr Khrapichev, a professor at the University of Oxford, put together this selection of what he calls “virtually-sliced” fruit and vegetables by running them through an MRI machine and putting the slices into chronological order to create these deconstructed fruit and vegetable portraits."

Kiwi slices imaged with MRI. Credit: Wellcome Images.

Bethe's Dictum: "always work on problems for which you possess an unfair advantage."

Goodbye Copernicus: "At the hands of astronomy and cosmology, we seem to have been reduced to near nothingness, specks within slivers of time and space, inside specks that are themselves entire universes. But how should we interpret this fact? Does this ultimate extension of the Copernican narrative seal our infinitely mediocre fate? The question is more complex than it initially seems."

13 Things You Might Not Know About Apollo 13, a.k.a. one of Jen-Luc Piquant's all-time favorite films. For example, star Tom Hanks was dubbed the "accuracy police," because he cared so much about getting the details right.

Why one of our simplest designs – the light bulb – is also one of our best. "I think it is a magic object: the humble light bulb is one of the simplest but loveliest of designs." -- Michael Anastassiades.

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Physics Week in Review: July 4, 2015

Physics Week in Review: July 18, 2015

By Jennifer Ouellette on July 18, 2015

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Subscribe Now!Physics Week in Review: July 11, 2015Why puddles stop spreading, five ways physics affects your gas mileage, and calculating how long it would take to drive to Pluto are among this week's physics highlights.

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